DeFiPP Seminar - Tanguy Bernard (GREThA, University of Bordeaux)

"Performance Enhancement and Motivation: An Experimental Investigation with Rural Public Servants in Ethiopia" (with Mekdim Regassa and Gashaw T. Abate)

Abstract: In situations where one’s work effort or accomplishment at a given task cannot be monitored, incentivizing agents through rewards are of limited use. And while it is well known that intrinsically motivated agents tend to invest more efforts, improving intrinsic motivation is rarely an actionable policy option. We investigate whether becoming more performant at a given task can act as a source of motivation for improved execution of a task – an option that can in itself be affected by policies. We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment with a group of 238 rural front-line government agents in Ethiopia whose work is largely unobservable to their manager. Our design exogenously varies agent’s performance in a first one-hour period to low- and high-performance conditions, while all were given the exact same high-performance conditions in a second period. We find that agents who were assigned to a low-performance condition in the first period outperformed in the second period those who were assigned to the high-performance condition throughout. These results hold under different payment schemes (flat or piece-rate). Using distinct data from a real-life randomized controlled trial that mimic the lab-in-the-field experiment, we provide evidence for the external validity of the results amongst Ethiopian rural front-line government agents.

Contact : Baland Jean-Marie - jean-marie.baland@unamur.be
Télecharger : vCal